Mentor Graphics Corporation, the worldwide technology and market share leader in Printed Circuit Board design (PCB) solutions, today announced the availability of the next-generation PADS® flow with the introduction of PADS 9.0. This significantly-enhanced release of the PADS flow adds new levels of functionality, scalability and integration, enabling designers to leverage many of Mentor’s unique and innovative technologies for design, analysis, manufacturing and multi-disciplined collaboration. With the scalable PADS 9.0 flow, users can cost-effectively design their products from standard to the industry’s most complex, highest performance, and densest PCBs.

Functionality now integrated and available in the scalable flow includes the addition of manufacturing and collaboration tools, and the world’s most powerful thermal, signal and power integrity analysis, as well as many core design entry and layout enhancements. The PADS flow provides maximum designer productivity and reduces time to market while implementing the most advanced PCB fabrication and IC/FPGA technologies into electronic products.

“With PADS high speed auto-routing, we were able to significantly reduce our design cycle, from more than two months to 40 hours,” stated Don Wood, electrical designer at SIE Computing Solutions, Inc. “We're looking forward to incorporating additional PADS capabilities, like HyperLynx signal integrity, to further reduce design spins and help us make better up-front decisions about our design strategies.”

Consistent with PADS 9.0 scalable flow strategy, Mentor now offers a series of pre-configured PADS Suites that address designer’s most aggressive technology needs at an extremely cost-effective price. A typical Suite configuration includes:

• Design entry including DxDesigner®, variant management, and data import/translators from competitors’ PCB design systems
• HyperLynx® pre-and post-layout signal integrity simulation, thermal analysis and analog simulation
• PADS Layout with powerful auto-routing, high-speed rule adherence, unlimited database and layers, and design reuse
• Advanced manufacturing rules
• 3D Viewer and integration to multi-disciplined collaboration solutions

“The release of PADS 9.0 exemplifies Mentor’s continuing commitment to delivering cutting-edge technology to the world’s largest PCB design user community,” said Dan Boncella, director of marketing, Systems Design Division of Mentor Graphics. “PADS offers a low cost of entry, yet delivers high performance that exceeds any other desktop PCB design solution on the market.”

Ease-of-use and integration improvements have been made throughout the flow. The DxDesigner tool, intuitive and easy-to-use, provides a complete system design capability in a single user environment. The environment integrates schematic, HDL, analog, and PCB design disciplines to accelerate the design process. A 3D viewer has been introduced to the PADS flow which allows users to get a true 3D representation of their design in the PCB environment. The 3D models of components—mechanical parts, such as brackets, and enclosures—can be imported to identify mechanical conflicts earlier in the design. Several enhancements for high-speed design have been made, including routing accordion patterns with arcs, accordion keep-outs, and differential pair tuning to ensure each trace is exactly the same length. Padstack creation has been enhanced to allow rounded and chamfered corners. New outputs have been introduced in PADS 9.0 including IPC356 netlist and a new “flat” DXF file. Other enhancements include new layer visibility commands, additional automation objects and methods, and much more.

PADS Flow Functionality, Integration and Scalability
In addition to many enhancements made to the core design entry and layout modules, the PADS 9.0 flow offers users the opportunity to seamlessly integrate many of Mentor’s advanced technology offerings:

• HyperLynx Analog provides a truly scalable solution for board-level analog and mixed signal simulation.
• I/O Designer™ offers a foundation for an effective FPGA/PCB co-design process enabling designers to optimize system performance and reduce PCB layers.
• HyperLynx Signal Integrity (SI) and Power Integrity (PI) enable engineers to design for optimum performance and reliability.
• HyperLynx Thermal integration allows quick and easy analysis of the thermal characteristics of PCBs early in the design process.
• A 3D Viewer allows users to pan, zoom, and rotate plus the ability to import 3D models of components and other mechanical devices.
• The visECAD™ tool enables real-time collaboration between designers and the rest of the supply chain (procurement, manufacturing, test, etc).

About PADS
PADS, Mentor Graphics’ worldwide leading desktop PCB design solution, enables individuals and design teams to develop PCBs within a highly productive and easy-to-use environment. Integrated and scalable, PADS allows individual engineers and designers to accomplish a wide breadth and depth of core PCB development tasks, including schematic entry, analog design, signal and power integrity, thermal analysis, and PCB layout-to-manufacturing preparation. To learn more about PADS, please visit www.mentor.com/pads

More information:

• PADS 9.0 Release Highlights
• What's New in PADS 9.0
• Introduction to PADS 9.0 video